If you’re part of the nearly 13 million people who saw Barbie on opening weekend, then you’ve probably spent the past week jamming to “I’m Just Ken,” buying all the pink clothing you can find, and spiraling about what it means to be a woman in today’s society, naturally.
But Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was not just a plastic-filled film about Mattel’s shining star. The movie also examined Barbie’s long and sometimes controversial history in American culture, even including Ruth Handler, the woman who invented Barbie, played by Rhea Perlman. However, only so much can be crammed into two hours, so here’s some of the history that Gerwig left out.
1. Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants.
In Barbie, Ruth Handler may be a ghost occupying an office on the 17th floor of the Mattel building, but in real life, she was a fierce businesswoman who came from humble beginnings. According to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Handler was the daughter of illiterate Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father, Jacob, immigrated to the United States in 1907 through Ellis Island and was sent to Denver, CO to pursue his trade as a blacksmith. Shortly after, he married Handler’s mother, Ida, and the couple’s first six children followed. Handler was born in 1916, now one of 10 children.
When Ida fell sick, Handler went to live with her sister for most of her young adult life. At age 19, Handler moved to Los Angeles and got a job working at Paramount Studios. In 1938, she married Izzy Handler, the grandson of a Ukrainian rabbi and an artist in industrial design. He had begun experimenting with a new plastic called Lucite to create trinkets, furniture, and accessories. Handler helped sell these items and, along with her husband and a close friend, they launched the company “Mattel.”
In 1945, Handler wanted her daughter Barbara to have action figures like her brother Ken, so she created her own. The first Barbie doll debuted at the New York toy fair in March 1959. And thanks to a revolutionary TV ad, Barbie became a household name. Handler sold 300,000 dolls in that first year, and the success only continued from there.
The Handler family’s Jewish identity remained important throughout their lives. Izzy — who had Americanized his name and changed it to Elliott — and Ruth helped found Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles in 1946. Handler was also honored as the first Woman of Distinction of the United Jewish Appeal.
2. Barbie’s first Dreamhouse didn’t have a kitchen.
Few aspects of the Barbie universe are as iconic as the Dreamhouse. Barbie’s Dreamhouse first came on the market in 1962, and it was complete with a television and record player, but no kitchen. According to 1960 Census data, 55% of women aged 25 to 29 years old were unemployed, married, and taking care of children under six years old. Although some women returned to work as the children got older, more than half of American women remained in the home. Barbie’s kitchen-less Dreamhouse offered an alternative vision for young girls — a home life free of domesticity and a space that was her own. For most women in the 1960s, this idea really was an unattainable dream.
While women had been legally able to own property since the 1800s, women were largely prevented from owning homes or even cars. Because women were not allowed to have mortgages, credit, or bank accounts without their husband’s signatures, only 0.1% of women were homeowners the year that Barbie’s Dreamhouse came out. And Barbie stayed ahead of the game for over a decade: the rule requiring a husband’s signature didn’t change until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974.
The advent of Barbie’s Dreamhouse created a reality that didn’t exist yet, and Barbie would continue breaking barriers in the job market too.
3. Barbie often held careers in male-dominated industries years before women actually got the job.
Barbie is probably best known for her variety of careers (200 and counting!), but a lesser-known fact is that Barbie was taking on these jobs several years before her real-life counterparts. For example, in 1962 — the same year that Barbie got her Dreamhouse — she became a professional tennis player. That came eight years before Title IX, which paved the way for many women to participate in sports, was enacted and nine years before Billie Jean King’s famous “Battle of the Sexes” match against the self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs.
Barbie also made the journey to space in 1965, 18 years before Sally Ride, the first American woman to make the journey. And according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Mattel released a Black Barbie astronaut in 1985 as part of its efforts to include more diverse dolls in the 1980s. Mae C. Jemison, the first Black female astronaut, went to space seven years later.
Throughout the rest of the 20th century, Barbie continued to take on jobs in male-dominated fields, from being a CEO to an airline pilot to a NASCAR driver. She was a symbol for girls everywhere that they could be whoever they wanted, years before the dream became attainable for women.
Plus, Barbie became President in 1992, so we’re still 31 years behind on that one.
4. “Earring Magic Ken” is considered the most financially successful Ken doll in Barbie history.
You may remember “Earring Magic Ken” as one of the discontinued dolls hanging out with Weird Barbie in the Barbie movie. And it’s true – Earring Magic Ken was a real thing, and he was super financially successful. In 2020, the New-York Historical Society added an Earring Magic Ken to their collections, and his story is an…interesting one.
Ken joined the Barbie universe in 1961, but by 1993, Mattel was looking to give Barbie’s beau an update to reflect what was cool in the 1990s. Naturally, they reached out to a group of five-and-six-year-olds to get their input on Ken’s new look. The girls gave Ken a serious makeover. He swapped his preppy ‘60s clothes for a lavender leather vest and mesh shirt, plus black jeans and loafers. Ken also bleached his hair and added a silver pendant and matching earring on his left ear.
Although earrings have become more gender-neutral in recent years, that was not the case in 1993. Many LGBTQ+ commentators took notice of Ken’s new style and jewelry, and many questioned if Ken was actually gay. His clothes matched what many young gay men on the club scene wore at the time, and some commentators even suggested that Ken’s pendant was a sex toy. Mattel found themselves embroiled in controversy and quickly pulled Earring Magic Ken from the shelves, but it’s believed that he was the most financially successful Ken doll ever. He’s more than just Ken.
5. Barbenheimer is real: army veteran Robert Yutaka Hasake worked for Mattel and donated his collection of 300+ Barbies to a New Jersey museum.
Barbenheimer is the latest pop culture crossover, and many people did a double screening of Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer over the weekend. Although Barbie and World War II history may not appear to have much in common, one former soldier might disagree.
Today, the Millville Army Airfield Museum, a small military history museum in New Jersey, has a vast collection of World War II-era memorabilia, including war posters, newspaper articles, and flags. But the museum also houses a collection of over 300 Barbies.
The collection came from Robert Yutaka Hasake who, as a child, was incarcerated in a U.S. concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. When he graduated from college, Hasake enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a Green Beret. After serving in the military, Hasake got a job at Mattel as a master model builder, where he worked on the design and execution of hundreds of Barbies. In 2004, Hasake donated his vast collection to the Seabrook Education Cultural Center in the town where his family was sent after their incarceration. The cultural center didn’t have enough room for the collection, so they lent it to the Millville Army Airfield Museum, where it remains to this day.
Although Barbie has surely had her fair share of victories and controversies over the years, she has constantly evolved to reflect cultural changes surrounding what it means to be a girl. From her creation, Barbie has attempted to show young girls a world full of opportunity and empowerment, even when several barriers still held women back. Gerwig’s vision of Barbie not only honors the history of this icon but also provides an incisive critique of how patriarchy continues to harm everyone (I mean, Ken asking if he’s still hot when he’s in his feelings? If that’s not showing how patriarchy harms men, I don’t know what is). We expect a lot out of Barbie – just as we place impossible expectations on women all the time – but as the history shows, Barbie has been leading the way for decades.
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